Introduction
In his 2001 Harvard Law Review article, ‘Savages, Victims, and Saviors: The Metaphor of Human Rights’, Makau Mutua put forth a powerful, and now classic, critique of international human rights politics.Footnote 1 Mutua’s three-pronged metaphor illuminated a ‘grand narrative’ of global human rights dynamics in which non-Western states were outwardly cast as savages, though the real, yet unspoken, savage was the backward cultures attributed to them, the victims were innocent and agentless non-Western populations (typically women and children), and the saviours were a host of Western actors and institutions and the enlightened human rights values they espoused.
This article argues that while Mutua’s Savages, Victims, Saviours (SVS) metaphor critique elucidates the operation of power through human rights politics, it also spurs a reactionary politics captured through an inverted metaphor in which actors are reassigned roles. Western imperialism and human rights treated as its extension become the savages. Non-Western states espousing anti-imperialism and their constructions of culture are recast as the victims, their victimhood subsuming and viewed as synonymous with the populations’ victimhood. Finally, committed anti-imperialists, anti-imperialist thought, anti-imperialist-branding states,Footnote 2 and their constructions of culture deemed to be resisting imperialism, all take on the role of saviours.
This article does not reject the core underlying critique put forth by the original SVS metaphor; rather, it aims to shed light on the anti-emancipatory effects of a reactionary politics the SVS line of critique often produces; these frequently include (1) diminishing the moral weight accorded to human rights claims made by local and diaspora voices, the underlying acts of state violence and subjugation they endure, and the human rights paradigm itself, (2) interrupting any sustained focus on anti-imperialist-branding states’ moral transgressions against their own populations, (3) defining non-Western populations through essentialist notions of their culture or religion just as traditional saviourism does (but this time valorising rather than vilifying culture), and (4) contributing to the creation of moral ambiguity around anti-imperialist-branding states’ subjugation of local populations by adhering exclusively to moral complexity.
This research makes several significant contributions. First, it presents an overview of the complex elements and various relationships encompassed in the reactionary anti-imperialist politics it examines. Second, it demonstrates the stakes of this politics, namely the legitimation of repressive states asserting anti-imperialism or homogenised cultural authenticity and the accordant undermining of local populations and social movements waging struggles in which the operation of power and, thus, the odds are heavily weighed against them. Third, the article illuminates how this politics extends to diasporas which can be subject to Reverse SVS politics, posit Reverse SVS critiques, and practise SVS politics. Finally, through its formulation of a metaphor reversing another metaphor, which is itself devised to elucidate and upend dominant human rights logics, the article taps into the explanatory power of the original SVS metaphor to illuminate the blind spots and contradictions of the reactionary politics it can spur and argue for the adoption of emancipatory projects capable of transcending the binaristic frameworks of both SVS and Reverse SVS metaphors.
Several factors gave rise to the use of Mutua’s SVS metaphor as this article’s point of departure. The seminal essay’s construction of its extended metaphor to artfully identify, explain, and synthesise the operation of power through human rights politics has rendered it a staple of human rights scholarship. Nonetheless, throughout years of research in and on Iran, I found that many Iranians’ lived realities and articulations of the conditions of their marginalisation diverged from the politics of those adhering to the SVS critique in important ways. Finally, the use of Mutua’s metaphor emerged from 15 years of observing students’ engagements with it. For some students, the SVS metaphor provided an eye-opening new perspective; for others, it crystallised dynamics they had some hazy notion of but could not fully piece together or articulate.Footnote 3 However, when asked to find examples of SVS politics, they produced material covering United Nations, human rights Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), and Western governments’ statements denouncing China’s treatment of Uyghurs, sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or arrests of Cuban dissidents in their analysis, becoming so focused on and troubled by the construction of the non-Western state or culture as ‘savage’ and the human rights or Western actor as ‘saviour’ that they simply glossed over the acts of subjugation encompassed.
The human rights contests sparked by the combination of Iran’s historical (and present) experiences of Western imperialism and a post-revolutionary state asserting an authentic Islamic and anti-imperialist raison d’être render Iran a particularly apt case study of Reverse SVS dynamics. An initial sketch of the interpretive claims and theoretical framework put forth in this article arose from accumulated thoughts and empirical observations from human rights-related collaborations and research undertaken in Iran in 1998–2000, 2002, and 2007 and on Iran from Western locales in 2013–14, and 2022–3 (once fieldwork inside Iran became untenable), encompassing dozens of interviews and interactions with human rights activists inside and outside of Iran, traditional and reformist Islamists, and ordinary Iranians. This empirical data provided an essential foundation for analysing the Iranian case study. However, instead of drawing directly from this data, this article employs three examples as core samples that contain and more effectively illustrate the full range and interconnections of Reverse SVS dynamics. These examples emerge from centre-left media, post-colonial scholarship addressing the Iranian regime’s cultural impositions, and feminist anti-war activism. They were selected because they (1) comprehensively encapsulated and reflected the various elements of Reverse SVS politics repeatedly observed in field research, (2) were recent (2011–21), and (3) occurred in different socio-political realms, reflecting the diversity of medium through which Reverse SVS politics operate.
The article begins by positioning its argument within the relevant literature. Next, it introduces the Reverse SVS metaphor of human rights and the examples used in the Iranian case study. From there, the article lays out each prong of the Reverse SVS metaphor and applies them to the Iranian case. The following section identifies and presents four detrimental effects of Reverse SVS politics, followed by a discussion of how each unfolds in the Iranian context. The article then briefly turns to Iran’s dramatic autumn 2022 ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ protests spurred by the state killing of Jina Mahsa Amini, to provide preliminary reflections on what the movement’s temporary departure from Reverse SVS human rights politics and a subsequent diaspora-driven reactionary swing back to SVS politics reveal about the limits of both metaphors.
The Western saviourism and human rights literature
Mutua’s ‘Savages, Victims, Saviors: The Metaphor of Human Rights’ is part of critical and post-colonial scholarship across disciplines seeking to shed light on how Western actors have deployed human rights and women’s rights in saviouristic, power-laden, and imperialistic ways. This literature includes Gayatri Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’,Footnote 4 Lila Abu Lughod’s Do Muslim Women Need Saving?,Footnote 5 and Mahmood Mandani’s Good Muslim, Bad Muslim Footnote 6 among other notable contributions. This literature often incorporates facets of Edward Said’s concept of orientalism, encompassing a power relationship and Western licence to judge, scrutinise, study, represent, enlighten, and govern the East.
Applying this prism, critical scholars have identified key ways power operates through human rights politics. First, internal sources, particularly, static and one-dimensional notions of backward culture or religion viewed in a vacuum, are designated as the primary source of local populations’ suffering and human rights violations, at once emptying them of political, economic, or historical context, and erasing operating international power structures.Footnote 7 Second, by adhering to categories of agentless victims or inexplicably violent, misogynist, morally deficient villains steeped in orientalism, Islamophobia, and racism, this power-laden human rights politics denies non-Western populations’ agency and bypasses the nuances and complexities of their lived experiences.Footnote 8 This politics in turn entrenches hierarchies of races, religions, and cultures.Footnote 9 Third, power-laden human rights deployments facilitate Western governments’ appropriating human rights to claim a moral high ground used to obscure or justify hegemonic Western geopolitics and interventions, ranging from bolstering authoritarian client states to political and military support for Israel and the subjugation of Palestinians, to fuelling or conducting devastating wars.Footnote 10 Finally, the idea that non-Western actors or populations eschewed human rights norms produced othering and dehumanisation used to exclude them from those very rights protections.Footnote 11 Laura Bush demonstrated these staples of American post-9/11 wars in her November 2001 radio address in which, after chronicling the Taliban’s subjugation of Afghan women, she declared ‘Because of our recent military gains, in much of Afghanistan, women are no longer imprisoned in their homes. They can listen to music and teach their daughters without fear of punishment.’Footnote 12
While this literature serves as an empowering tool for mobilisations against the power dynamics it illuminates, it is encumbered by significant blind spots and contradictions. Like the politics it rejects, its critical stances tend to be essentialising, one-dimensional, and a product of binary moral thinking. It often adopts the same essentialising categories of East and West, assigns an ‘innate, natural or fixed character’ to them, adheres to bounded notions of ‘singular, or at least distinctive cultural packages’, and assumes that ‘geography denotes “authentic” subjectivity’.Footnote 13 In these ways, scholars producing this literature frequently reproduce ‘the very logic they seek to critique’.Footnote 14
Second, this literature tends to take reactionary normative stances. While Mutua positions his critique as a rejection of ‘a black-and-white construction that pits good against evil’,Footnote 15 the human rights as imperialist project literature often simply takes on inverted black-and-white constructions of good against evil. If imperialism, orientalism, and Islamophobia are morally reprehensible, then entities and movements asserting anti-imperialism or non-Western or Islamic authenticity are to be normatively embraced or shielded from criticism.Footnote 16 Third, despite asserting solidarity with non-Western populations, this literature can overlook local populations’ real-world lived experiences of subjugation, instead focusing solely on ‘the world of representation’.Footnote 17 Because within Reverse SVS politics local populations are viewed almost exclusively through the lens of geopolitics or international injustice, they are confronted by the ‘double bind’ of subjugation from both imperialism and anti-imperialist politics obscuring local injustices.Footnote 18
From Savages, Victims, Saviours to Reverse Savages, Victims, Saviours
The SVS line of critique has been widely embraced within a variety of academic fields across disciplines and has spread beyond academia to activist and left-of-centre popular realms. Particularly over the previous decade’s ‘decolonial turn’,Footnote 19 consciousness of Western imperialism and its innumerable moral wrongs, contemporary consequences, and manifestations, along with the ways Western power could be packaged in human rights discourses, grew as part of a broader rise in emancipatory politics.Footnote 20 More and more people and actors in the West viewed non-Western and Global South locales as places where their own governments were to varying degrees implicated in producing grave suffering and injustice. This prompted a spectrum of individuals, from leftist intellectuals and critical scholars to left-of-centre activists, media, and segments of broader populations to develop a fear of generating propaganda for Western warsFootnote 21 and otherwise objectionable geopolitics by reproducing Western governments’ instrumental deployments of human rights. Accordingly, they rejected Western governments’ enlisting of human rights towards imperialist ends, and the essentialising categories, cultural hierarchies, and othering encompassed, while seeking to part ways with traditional saviourism.Footnote 22
This greater recognition of the operation of power through prevailing human rights politics, and the ensuing drive to avoid being Western saviours designating non-Western victims and savages, however, produced a Savages, Victims, Saviours politics of its own: a Reverse Savages, Victims, Saviours human rights politics. The Reverse Savages, Victims, Saviours metaphor is a normative critique of a reactionary politics that in its attempt to counter the power-laden human rights politics captured by Mutua’s SVS critique, downplays the moral wrongs of repressive states asserting anti-imperialist identities while adopting de facto scepticism of any human rights claims made against them. This politics can range from an uncompromising embrace of Reverse SVS categories to its less overt enactment through withholding or watering down criticisms of states subject to imperialist politics.
Overview of Iran as a paradigmatic case
Throughout its 46-year tenure, violence, repression, and institutionalised discrimination have been central tenets of the post-revolutionary Iranian state’s modus operandi and ordinary Iranians’ experiences of it. During this time, accounts of arrests, torture, sexual assaults in detention, executions, violent suppression of protests, and suppression of free expression have alternatively constituted the backdrop to or inescapable forefront of Iranian political life. Alongside repression, the Iranian state instituted formalised legal discrimination against women and religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities in family law, criminal law, and inheritance law as well as a penal code prescribing violent retributive sanctions. This was combined with a web of laws regulating everything from the spaces men and women occupied, to the colour and thickness of their clothes and women’s mandatory hijabs, to banning of forms of alcohol, mixed-sex socialising, and types of music and dance, subjecting those who did not comply to incessant policing, daily harassment, and the real possibility of physical sanction. These constituted just some of the most striking forms of ‘internal colonization’Footnote 23 and ‘internal cultural imperialism’Footnote 24 many Iranians experienced.
However, a litany of Western imperialist encroachments, and dramatic historical episodes of Iranian anti-imperialist resistance, such as Mohamad Mosaddeq’s nationalisation of Iranian oil and the 1979 Revolution unseating Iran’s Western-allied monarch, provided the Iranian state with an anti-imperialist brand, setting the stage for the Reverse SVS politics. Here, I introduce three representative examples of Reverse SVS politics to be applied in subsequent sections laying out the inverted metaphor and its anti-emancipatory effects. I would underscore that far from being absent, the imperialist politics to which interlocutors object in each case explored is present and often of real consequence.
Kambiz Hosseini and Parazit on Al Jazeera
The first example is a November 2011 episode of ‘The Stream’ on Al Jazeera English featuring Kambiz Hosseini and Saman Arbabi, hosts of a satire show called Parazit (meaning static), funded and broadcast into Iran by the United States’ Voice of America.Footnote 25 Watched by millions inside Iran between 2008 and 2012, the show captured the absurdities of Iranians’ experiences of the regime and ‘express(ed) the public’s displeasure with power as it represents(ed) an ordinary person’s view’,Footnote 26 often showcasing the regime’s repression and instrumentalisations of anti-imperialism and Islam.
The Stream episode titled ‘Parazit: Voice of America or Voice of the People’, began with a clip of Hosseini’s animated satire:
This is Parazit, a filthy show … from the children of the revolution who’ve now become the bozo sell-out traitors hired by the foreign enemy of the people of Iran, intended to brainwash Iranians and destroy the Iranian family through … the ‘Great Satan’s’ propaganda for its grand cultural conquest, to bring imperialism to our Islamic country.Footnote 27
It then shows Hosseini’s equally satirical rendition of the headlines ending with ‘What else can I say, nothing major has happened in the past week, only twenty, thirty people were executed in Vakilabad Prison!’. The Stream host, Imran Gowda. picks up with ‘OK, well I want their coffee machine’ before transitioning to the charge that Parazit spreads ‘cultural propaganda’.Footnote 28 From there, Gowda, a co-host, and an Iranian-American commentator offering an anti-imperialist critique of Parazit, press the Parazit hosts on the allegation that their show serves American interests, repeatedly referencing a rare Parazit segment with undeniable imperialist entanglements: Hosseini’s interview of Hilary Clinton paired with footage of Clinton threatening to ‘obliterate’ Iran if it attacked Israel.
Throughout, the Parazit hosts defend themselves against the charge that they serve as a tool of American imperialism. Hosseini posits that a US-funded platform is the only platform available to them to reflect Iranians’ voices while referencing Al Jazeera’s own Qatari governmental funding. One exchange is particularly illuminating.
Arbabi: No one in the US tells us what to do.
Guest challenging Parazit: They don’t have to. They already agree with you.
Arbabi: Is it bad to agree with criticising the human rights record inside Iran? Is that a bad thing?
Guest challenging Parazit: Is that what you think – that the US’ main goal is human rights in Iran?
Arabi: I don’t care what the US thinks. My audience is an Iranian audience.
The Stream co-host: He’s saying he is happy to be a tool of the US government … Just kidding.Footnote 29
References to the regime’s repression come overwhelmingly from the Parazit hosts and an audience tweet stating ‘Watch the show … Parazit reflects the voice of Iranians that cannot be heard’.Footnote 30 When prompted to compare the regime to the Shah’s, Arbabi responds that, while a dictator, the former monarch ‘did not deal with people in such savage ways as the Islamic Republic does’, adding, ‘We are not comparing Pepsi and Coke. We are talking about … issues inside Iran today. When I left Iran, they were throwing acid in women’s faces because they were not wearing hijab properly’, at which point Hosseini interjects, ‘you guys are sitting here outside of Iran. You have no idea what’s going on. People are struggling inside Iran.’Footnote 31
Elsewhere, Hosseini appeals to the moral clarity in the plight of Iranians inspiring their satire: ‘You have to take sides … We took sides with human rights … We took sides with people inside Iran and their voice and their demands … they want the dictator to be gone.’Footnote 32 Gowda ends with ‘Final question to you guys: any Iranian officials on the show?’, to which Hosseini sarcastically responds, ‘Yeah, I would love to have Khamenei on the show.’Footnote 33
A post-colonial reading of a teenager’s arrest for posting a dancing video
The second example is of an academic article published in Third World Quarterly in 2021, titled ‘“Westoxication” and Resistance: The Politics of Dance in Iran #dancingisnotacrime’ by Ghoncheh Tazmini, analysing the 2018 arrest of 17-year-old Maedeh Hojabri for posting Instagram videos of herself dancing unveiled.Footnote 34 Following the arrest, Hojabri was shown on state television tearfully confessing and apologising before being released. The regime closed her Instagram account due to its ‘criminal content’. The incident sparked condemnation within Iran and a social media campaign in which Iranians posted videos of themselves dancing in defiance using the hashtag #dancingisnotacrime.
Tazmini argues that the state is not categorically against dancing, only particular forms which counter regime members’ adherence to the pre-revolutionary discourse of Westoxification, ‘a narrative predicated on a return to “cultural authenticity”, and a social critique of the past’.Footnote 35 This meant the teenager, ‘in the eyes of regime hardliners was not a 17-year-old but a historically constructed symbol or artifact of neo-imperialist cultural hegemony’,Footnote 36 and her arrest signified ‘a form of state-centric cultural resistance’.Footnote 37 She elaborates:
Dancing is not a crime in Iran … the regime’s reaction to Hojabri’s dancing was a product of a complicated historical dialectic with the West … I have interpreted the arrest and the crackdown as a projection of the regime’s historical grievances.
… The youngster’s repertoire of Western-inspired dance styles in Western urban attire represented a form of cultural subjugation to hegemonic Western norms – the very norms they resisted by overthrowing the Westernising Pahlavi Shah…Footnote 38
Tazmini identifies the goal of the study as offering ‘a counter-narrative that empowers the subject of my study’, which she identifies as the Iranian state.
I have revealed the disruptive potential of a young woman’s dance, which had the power to trigger the ideological impulses of the Islamic Republic … ultimately, ‘power’ rested with the tormented young dancer, while ‘resistance’ belonged to the juggernaut of the Islamic Republic that felt threatened by an innocent youngster’s social media activity.Footnote 39
Tazmini’s post-colonial analysis thus attends to past imperialist encroachments resulting in the loss of agency, othering, loss of power, and victimisation of the state and its constructions of culture.
An anti-war, anti-sanctions mission to Iran
The final example stems from a series of blogposts from the American feminist anti-war group Code Pink, chronicling their 2019 Citizen Diplomacy trip to Iran.Footnote 40 One blogpost states the delegation seeks to learn about ‘aspects of life in Iran under the brutal sanctions the U.S … placed’ and bring Iranians’ first-hand stories of suffering caused by these sanctions and military threats back to Americans.Footnote 41 The delegation visits state institutions and meets with government officials and loyalists who do not deviate from carefully crafted Iranian state narratives of victimhood from and resistance to American imperialism. This includes meeting with foreign minister Javad Zarif who is described as giving a ‘hell of a speech’ that is ‘stunningly cogent and riveting’ in which:
He argued persuasively that the United States couldn’t be opposed to Iran for any of the reasons it routinely gives for its hostile stance, particularly given the comparatively far vaster human rights violations and regional military activity of close U.S. ally Saudi Arabia …Footnote 42
They meet with the parliament speaker’s assistant who ‘pointed out the hypocrisy of the U.S. and U.K. in refusing to oppose the repression in … Saudi Arabia and Bahrain’.Footnote 43 They visit a Shah-era prison turned museum with former prisoners available to recount the experiences of torture. The post notes that while delegates asked about the Islamic Republic’s political prisoners, their guide declined to answer.
The Code Pink delegation also visits or appears on numerous state-run media outlets. They visit Press TV, known for producing government propaganda in English and participate in a panel with one of its anchors, introduced as an African-American Muslim convert unjustly arrested by the Trump administration. They also report holding a ‘final press conference at the Fars media offices’, the media arm of the Revolutionary Guard whose intelligence division carries out detentions and torture of dissidents, commenting ‘with 11 video cameramen and a total of 30 media attending. We were on Channel 1 at 7 pm.’Footnote 44
The blogposts feature repeated denouncements of American imperialism and double standards, namely the 1953 coup, support for Iraq during the 1980–8 Iran-Iraq war, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, support for Saudi Arabia, the ever-looming threat of American militarism, and the impact of American sanctions. Only two posts seriously departed from the pervasive ‘all is well outside the devastation of US policies’ narrative. One post states that the delegation felt ‘used’ when their hosts insisted they visit a nuclear reactor site, signalling that their meetings were state-choreographed. The second was an account of a delegation member’s parting hug with an ‘interpreter/minder’: ‘We both opened our arms in that international woman’s way of connecting … She pulled her scarf down, showed her hair to the world, opened her arms in a gesture of freedom … so we shared that moment of freedom.’Footnote 45
The Reverse Savages, Victims, Saviours metaphor of human rights politics
Here, the article first lays out the three prongs of the Reverse SVS metaphor followed by a discussion of how each operates in the examples introduced above. Figure 1 provides a brief overview of the roles assigned in both the human rights politics captured in both the SVS and Reverse SVS metaphors.
Roles assigned within SVS and Reverse SVS politics .
Figure 1 Long description
The table compares Mutua's SVS Metaphor of Human Rights Politics with the Reverse SVS Metaphor. In the SVS metaphor, 'Savage' refers to outwardly non-Western states with 'backward culture.' 'Victim' describes agentless non-Western populations, especially women and children, subject to state violence. 'Savior' includes Western governments, INGOs and the UN promoting Western liberal values. In the Reverse SVS metaphor, 'Savage' is Western imperialist states using human rights as extensions of imperialism. 'Victim' is non-Western populations under 'anti-imperialist victim branding state,' where state victimhood overshadows the population's. 'Savior' consists of leftist intellectuals and post-colonial scholars promoting authentic culture and religion.
Reverse Savage
In Mutua’s SVS metaphor, ‘the deviant’ non-Western state but, ultimately, the non-West’s backward culture is the ‘savage’ of human rights politics while Western states, institutions, international NGOs, and the human rights corpus serve as the saviour, and local human rights NGOs are ‘collaborators in the civilizing mission’.Footnote 46 In the Reverse SVS metaphor, these saviours now take on the role of the savage. In this formulation, Western governments are the ‘principle perpetrators’Footnote 47 of injustice and exceptional or ‘singular sources of evil’.Footnote 48 They are joined in the savage role by actors or discourses considered to be contaminated by or colluding with Western imperialism. Imperialism becomes part of the meaning accorded to, or part of the ‘embedded normativities’Footnote 49 of human rights, rendering it an instrument of Western imperialism and as such, an extension of the Savage.Footnote 50 Accordingly, human rights turns into a site of struggle and contestation, a terrain on which imperialism is to be battled and from which its victims are to be saved. Equally, local voices or in exile and diaspora members denouncing anti-imperialist-branding states’ violence and subjugation through rights discourses become viewed as native informants facilitating Western imperialist agendas and as such, another extension of the savage.
These dynamics are reflected in the Iranian case where the United States is the primary, and often exclusive, perpetrator of moral wrongs, and the only discernible source of Iranians’ suffering. This is reflected in the Code Pink delegation describing their trip as a search for Iranian accounts of the suffering caused by American policies, and aided by the regime’s carefully curated itinerary, they never move far from this singular source of Iranian suffering. Further, in each example, when human rights is invoked, it is treated as an extension of American imperialism through associations with or attributions of imperialist roots, actors, intentions, and outcomes. In The Stream episode, the imperialist stamp on human rights is so pervasive that it prompts Parazit co-host Saman Arbabi to interject ‘Human rights is not an American right … It’s not the American government. It’s a universal right.’Footnote 51
Finally, as The Stream episode also illustrates, those like the Parazit hosts who try to highlight the Iranian state’s violence also become extensions of US imperialism, subjected to scepticism and charges of doing empire’s bidding. As Tafakori notes, Iranian diaspora voices regularly become subject to ‘strategies of deauthentication’, denying recognition of their ‘articulations through … questioning the sincerity or motivation of [their] anger at injustice’.Footnote 52 She further argues through a territorial or ‘spatial politics of deauthentication’, the same accounts of state abuses of power are accorded more authenticity when put forth from inside Iran than from the diaspora.Footnote 53 However, while campaigns challenging mandatory veiling or state repression from within Iran were generally not subject to the same attacks as diaspora campaigns, they nonetheless could not generate the same global visibility or feminist solidarity as similar campaigns like Argentina’s violence against women #NiUnaMenos campaign. Moreover, even the distinction between external SVS politics and internal activism is not always upheld. Tazimini begins with a forceful critique of traditional Western saviourism, but her treatment of the Hojabri case shifts to ‘Iranians from all walks of life posting videos of themselves dancing’ and their misreading of the regime’s motives.Footnote 54 In The Stream episodes, the Parzit hosts are asked whether their show is a ‘mouthpiece for the Green Movement’, treating the extraordinary 2009 mass protest movement seeking democratic rights as morally ambiguous or suspect because it aligned with American human rights discourses. Both instances reflect a blurring of the lines between external imperialist actors and internal resistance to state subjugation in ways that approach constructing even the Iranian population making rights claims against the state as an extension of the savage.
Reverse Victim
In the politics critiqued by Mutua’s SVS metaphor, ‘the victim figure is a powerless, helpless innocent whose naturalist attributes have been negated by the primitive and offensive actions of the state or the cultural foundations of the state’, constituting the non-Western state as a pariah.Footnote 55 In Reverse SVS politics, outwardly subaltern, non-Western populations subjugated by Western imperialism are the victims. However, if their governments assert anti-imperialist identities, an ‘apolitical victim’Footnote 56 status is accorded to the state which is ‘seen as the main actor in a struggle for liberation’.Footnote 57 Such states become ‘symbols of injustice’, and redressing their victimhood comes to represent ‘an attempt to bring justice to them and the world’.Footnote 58 Similarly, the victim state’s definition, designation, and mediation of what constitutes anti-imperialist politics or authentic culture or religion threatened by Western imperialism becomes an extension of the victim in need of protection. Further, just as race frequently structures SVS politics and its hierarchies, it can also structure Reverse SVS politics through what Aswad calls a ‘white is bad, brown/black is good’ logic which removes black and brown actors’ moral agency.Footnote 59
The state victim construction of Reverse SVS politics is often entangled with what I call state victim branding and anti-imperialist state victim branding as forms of state branding among others identified in recent years.Footnote 60 State victim branding can be defined as states’ active and strategic attempts to tap into the external legitimation which assertions of embodying the suffering of their populations and, in the case of state anti-imperialist victim branding, being subject to the injustice of Western imperialism can provide them. This self-branding stems from calculations that external recognition of their state victimhood claims can provide status and legitimation.Footnote 61 In this context, strategic and ideational commitments are not mutually exclusive; state actors’ victimhood claims can stem from varying degrees of both ideational and strategic motivations. Even if an international audience accords the state a ‘complex victim’Footnote 62 (both victim and perpetrator) designation, it can provide a victim affordance – enough victim status to overshadow and muddy the moral clarity around their transgressions. Because anti-imperialist-branding states’ discourses mirror legitimate anti-imperialist claims, those with anti-imperialist commitments, but far removed from the lived realities of these states’ repression, often uncritically accept their victim branding. In this way, states can reduce scrutiny by presenting themselves as victims of imperialism.Footnote 63
Crucially, while Mutua’s SVS critique demonstrates how imperialist human rights politics pit the population against the state by presenting the victim population ‘as a helpless innocent who has been abused directly by the state … or pursuant to an offensive cultural or political practice’,Footnote 64 Reverse SVS politics conversely paint the population as in harmony with the state and culture. Not only is the anti-imperialist-branding state designated the victim, its victim status is cast upon the population. The population’s victimhood is subsumed by and treated as synonymous with the victim state and culture, irrespective of how much that population considers itself up against them. At the same time, anti-imperialism is the only possible or ‘intelligible’ source of their victimhoodFootnote 65 and as such, the only moral stance they can take. The moral offences of imperialism come to dominate understandings of the victimhood of their national contexts, state, and population combined, while depoliticising, downplaying, or withholding recognition of the population’s suffering at the hands of the anti-imperialist-branding state and its cultural impositions. Once again, local populations become agentless innocent victims.
In the Iranian case, accounts of American imperialism pair with omissions of any serious accounts of the regime’s repression or subjugation of Iranians to construct the state as victim narrative. In the Tazmini article, the teenager subject to the state’s repression has power vis-à-vis the resisting state, warranting concern for the state’s othering, and loss of power and agency rooted in representations of the state as exclusively authoritarian and wreaking ‘havoc in the region while repressing its own people’.Footnote 66 The article also argues that the othered Iranian state should be given the ability to represent itself to avoid stripping it of its agency and citing Siapera, to avoid further ‘victimising’ it.Footnote 67 Tazmini does include several key qualifications and nuances. She acknowledges that according agency to the state may be ‘problematic’ and writes that her ‘objective is not to validate the regime’s choices by bestowing agency on it’ but to investigate regime discourses around Hojabri using a Saidian lens.Footnote 68 She adds that ‘scholarly balance’ necessitates acknowledging that the Iranian response to Hojabri “represented a form of “Occidentalism”’ and that Orientalism and Occidentalism ‘feed off of each other’.Footnote 69 Tazmini further notes that the ‘regime continues to reproduce and to reify the narrative of a perpetual revolutionary struggle against foreign encroachment’, and the stance is taken ‘to ensure compliance and regime durability’.Footnote 70 Here, Terman’s critique of post-colonial feminist scholarship is key to understanding the victim status nonetheless accorded to the Iranian state despite such qualifications. Citing Lila Abu-Lughod’s statement that her ‘intention … is not to defend or excuse the violence it tries to name’ in Abu-Lughod’s critique of the liberal feminist treatment of honour crimes, Terman states, ‘the question … is not what Abu-Lughod intends to do but what her analysis actually does – how it frames, packages, and presents … the honor crime – regardless of her stated intentions’.Footnote 71 Similarly, notwithstanding its qualifications and disavowals, cumulatively ‘the modes of argumentation, omissions … framings’,Footnote 72 areas of emphasis and de-emphasis in Tazmini’s article, ‘set the stage for normative evaluation’Footnote 73 of the state as victim. In particular, the victim construction arises from the article’s privileging of an SVS critique and treatment of the state’s repression as largely benign (both discussed in subsequent sections). It also arises from the article de-emphasising the fact that contrary to the pre-revolutionary era in which Westoxification undeniably gave expression and ideational impetus to revolutionaries’ aspirations for freedom from Western domination, some of those revolutionaries came to monopolise power through the state and to maintain their grip on power through widespread coercion for over four decades. Highlighting regime members’ principled commitments to anti-imperialism while downplaying their instrumental deployments of anti-imperialism as a tool for the justification of power and an array of transgressions against Iranians, accords the state a distorted victim status and moral stature.
Concurrent with the construction of the state as victim, Iranians’ international subjugation is centred while their domestic subjugation is decentred, and the state’s victimhood at once subsumes the populations’ and crowds out Iranians’ experiences of suffering at the hands of their anti-imperialist-branding state. The Code Pink chronicles overwhelmingly attribute ordinary Iranians’ suffering to sanctions, US militarism, and the Trump administration’s travel ban. One delegation member comments: ‘Despite the 40 years of sanctions, life goes on … despite all that, you are not bending to the needs of the West and clearly really suffering for it. You are a strong and resilient society.’Footnote 74 Another blogpost submits: ‘The sanctions instead of turning the country away from their government had yet again united a country against the US.’Footnote 75 A third blogpost suggests that even the dearth of encountering ordinary people denouncing US policies as state officials did could not convince them that Iranians harboured serious grievances beyond American imperialism. ‘Although the effects of the sanctions may not always be obvious just from looking, if you dig beneath the surface and ask people the right questions, you’ll find how U.S. policies are negatively affecting the Iranian people.’Footnote 76 Tazmini also explicitly rejects the notion that Iranians’ challenges to the regime’s treatment of Hojabri speak to any serious cleavages between Iranians and the Islamic Republic, arguing that ‘the broad range of reactions to the teen’s arrest suggests that Iranian state and society are not as polarized as they appear to be. There is no clear “us versus them” binary in relation to cultural norms and standards.’Footnote 77 Moreover, the article highlights the anti-imperialist political subtext of dance but omits the internal political subtext of dance as an everyday means of resisting the regime’s top-down Islamisation while insisting that Hojabri’s motives were apolitical.
Reverse saviour
In Mutua’s SVS metaphor, as the primary saviour, human rights are part of a civilising mission and therefore often operate ‘as an attack on non-European cultures’, while its ‘morally righteous’ agents including the United Nations and human rights activists serve as ‘human rights zealots’ claiming a ‘monopoly on virtue’ with a purpose to universalise, civilise, and ‘Christianise’ with ‘missionary zeal’.Footnote 78 As he elaborates, human rights can be
a project for the redemption of the redeemers, in which whites who are privileged globally as a people who have historically visited untold suffering and savage atrocities against non-whites-redeem themselves by “defending” and ‘civilizing’ ‘lower’, ‘unfortunate’, and ‘inferior’ peoples.Footnote 79
In contrast, the Reverse SVS metaphor’s initial saviours are anti-imperialist ideals and a range of international actors with anti-imperialist commitments who come to view themselves as capable of seeing and speaking the truth of the West’s power-laden human rights rhetoric when others, including local voices, cannot. Mutua’s characterisation of human rights international NGOs ‘as foot soldiers, missionaries, and proselytizers … who see themselves as … single-handedly rooting out evil in Third World countries and cultures by shining light where darkness reigns’Footnote 80 can also characterise reverse saviours, who similarly provide diagnosis, ‘therapies and remedies’ for the perceived victims.Footnote 81 As Aswad notes, while predicated on ‘self-flagellation’ rather than the ‘self-admiration’ of traditional American exceptionalism, ‘the exceptional evil of the US is conjured to assuage white guilt and redeem oneself’ by adopting narratives of apologia.Footnote 82 Diaspora progressives assuage an extra layer of guilt arising from a sense of residing in the heart of empire.
Secondarily, although the anti-imperialist-branding state is an apolitical innocent concerning its actions within the domestic political realm, within the international political realm it is accorded agency and valorised as a savior and political actor. The state promotes this status by tapping into the contradictions of Western human rights politics on the one hand, and through claims of being guardians of their societies’ authentic cultural identities and sovereign equality, on the other.Footnote 83 In both instances, the rejection of human rights criticisms becomes an emancipatory act of resistance – saving their populations from imperialism disguised as human rights. Finally, whereas in Mutua’s metaphor, notions of ‘backward cultures’ constitute the true savage for which the state serves as a mere vessel, in the inverted metaphor, anti-imperialist-branding states’ constructions of authentic culture or religion gain saviuor status in addition to victim status.
In the case of Iran, anti-imperialist and post-colonial interlocutors can see themselves as saving Iranians from both Western geopolitics and ‘a long tradition of orientalist representations’.Footnote 84 This is reflected in the Code Pink delegation’s framing of their mission to Iran. One member described it as an attempt ‘to convey my sense of the human worth of a people I’m hoping to spare from the unmerited, unprecedent devastation seemingly intended for them by my government’.Footnote 85 While the intervention is rooted in a desired sense of moral obligation to challenge power structures producing immense human suffering, it turns into saviourism when the stances taken are not adequately rooted in, overtake, or undermine local articulations of the source of their subjugation.
Further, while the assumption that restrictions the Iranian state claims preserve religious or cultural identity are a form of anti-imperialist resistance is implicit in The Stream episode and Code Pink chronicles, Tazmini’s post-colonial treatment of #dancingisnotacrime adopts the disposition more unequivocally by arguing that ‘the arrest of the rising media star can be interpreted as a form of state-centric cultural resistance’.Footnote 86 Despite being presented as simply an account of regime actors’ subject position, a more ‘subliminal normativity operating’Footnote 87 in the article effectively valorises what it too readily concedes as state-centric cultural resistance.
Detrimental effects of Reverse SVS politics
Reverse SVS logics give rise to a politics that has a significant real-life impact on local populations. Broadly, Reverse SVS politics foreclose local populations’ ability to give expression to, highlight, and seek global solidarity for their subjugation and suffering caused by their anti-imperialist branding states. Four ways this occurs are discussed in what follows.
Diminishing the moral weight of state violence and human rights claims
The first effect of Reverse SVS politics is to diminish the moral weight of both the human rights discourses deployed by local and diaspora voices, and the underlying acts of state violence and subjugation being denounced through rights claims. Filtered through Reverse SVS logics, an account of a student activist arrested and tortured by the anti-imperialist branding state can be evaluated as an instrumentalisation of injustice towards imperialist ends, rather than an account of a moral wrong. This allows the act of violence and accordant human rights claims to be dismissed, ignored, and emptied of their moral weight, and the type of moral judgement which would ordinarily be made were they free of the imperialist stamp, to be suspended. In this way, the moral substance of rights claims becomes trapped in the polarising discursive terrain of Reverse SVS politics.
Through the Reverse SVS lens, the human rights paradigm is viewed as irredeemably instrumentalised and corrupted and, as such, threatening. In particular, Western double standards (inconsistent human rights stances) or hypocrisy (glaring contradictions between human rights rhetoric and practice) prompt Reverse SVS adherents to view human rights as a categorically unserious tool of Western imperialism. This default hostile disposition with which they are met when they invoke human rights undermines marginalised non-Western populations’ attempts to aspire for even the ‘thin protections’Footnote 88 provided by the human rights paradigm.
The Iranian case reflects these dynamics. In the Code Pink trip, the United States’ double standards such as support for Saudi Arabia and imperialist policies towards Iran are the only moral affronts warranting condemnation. American support for ‘feminicidal Saudi Arabia’ with its ‘far vaster human rights violations’ is reason to dismiss charges of Iranian human rights violations.Footnote 89 Similarly, in The Stream episode when the Parazit hosts attempt to highlight the Iranian state’s violence, their accounts are either sidestepped or treated as an obstacle to challenging American imperialism. The banality accorded to the Iranian state, its repression, and its cultural impositions also appear in Tazmini’s treatment of #dancingisnotacrime, where the regime’s transgression is reduced to the teenager’s humiliation on national television and its motivation reduced to post-revolutionary ideals, in an effort ‘to preserve cultural indigeneity’.Footnote 90 The only mention of rights is to the protests being held around Hojabri’s ‘“violated rights”’ (in quotation marks) and the regime’s ‘right to enact defiance in the cultural realm’ (without quotation marks).Footnote 91 Besides a passing reference to the state validating culture ‘albeit through repressive means’ and another to the Shah’s repression, the topic of repression is taken up to interrogate ‘Euro-American liberal and neo-liberal frameworks of freedom that erroneously point to orthodox Islam or state repression as the exclusive explanation behind the dancer’s arrest’ and Western portrayals of the regime as ‘entirely backward and repressive’.Footnote 92 While the use of ‘exclusive explanation’ and ‘entirely’ add important nuance, concurrent de-emphasis and omissions ‘strongly bias the reader’s understanding’Footnote 93 of the gravity of the regime’s repression. State-mandated veiling or regulation of dancing are not treated as serious transgressions, and the real possibility of the use or threat of torture to extract a clearly forced confession is never raised.
Interrupting a sustained focus on anti-imperialist9branding state’s moral transgressions
Second, progressive saviourism interrupts the focus on the local state as ‘the initiator of violence’ and refocuses it ‘on the West as the principal perpetrator’ of injustice,Footnote 94 shrinking the space available to local and diaspora voices to articulate their emancipatory claims against anti-imperialist branding states. Because those making human rights claims face scepticism and accusations of being native informants or propagandists facilitating Western imperialism, they are regularly challenged, disrupting ‘the local production of discourse on state violence’.Footnote 95 Relatedly, anti-imperialist activists ‘unintentionally saturate the space available for the testimony’Footnote 96 of populations suffering at the hands of anti-imperialist-branding states, preventing local populations from effectively communicating their moral stances against their repressive states derived from their own experiences to international audiences. This politics ‘not only disregards the suffering and pain’ of such populations, but it ‘also ignores the inspiring struggles they are leading, in the face of brutal violence, to create a different reality’.Footnote 97
In the Iranian case, this disruption of focus on local wrongs and subsequent rechannelling towards American wrongs is most pronounced in a rare question critical of the regime posed by The Stream host Gowda to the show’s third guest posing an anti-imperialist critique of Parazit:
Gowda: Is it not a source of embarrassment then for the Iranian government that when they put up a firewall … and cut people’s access to expressing themselves, to protesting freely and clamping down … on their human rights … and their rights of communicating … their grievances, inadvertently… what will happen is … your biggest enemy will end up funding your very own people who need their voices to be heard? …
Guest Challenging Parazit: Without a doubt, without a doubt, the Iranian government’s censorship of media and … dissent is … appalling and totally despicable and … indefensible, but I don’t think that’s … what the issue is here. To say that you guys are standing on the side of human rights is … really fantastic and … the show is valuable. However, again, you are being broadcast by a government that consistently abrogates those very human rights that you think that you are trying to uphold by you know, having torture prisons and drone attacks on civilians and assassinations of US citizens and invading and occupying countries all around Iran and threatening Iran with military…Footnote 98
Here a question about Iranian state transgressions is answered by redirecting the focus to American double standards and human rights violations, mirroring a staple rhetorical move of Iranian state responses to human rights challenges.
The Code Pink blogs follow a similar pattern. Despite initially expressing an intent to learn about the key areas women’s advocates are focusing on, women’s rights only appear in an account of a Tehran University panel with Code Pink members and the state-run Press TV anchor.
Women’s rights were a major topic of discussion in this session (largely omitted from our meeting earlier that day due to a focus on U.S.–Iran relations, which are unlikely to have been soured by feminist concerns when our close alliance with feminocidal Saudi Arabia has not been affected). … common among Iranians present was the familiar argument that so long as the U.S. threatens Iran with sanctions and invasion, it lacks moral authority to speak on other issues and drives Iranian society towards the right on gender, both through its actions’ association of liberalism with imperial cruelty, and … impact of precarity imposed on civilians: both in terms of sanctions-induced poverty and the threat of war.Footnote 99
While the double standards, instrumentalisation, and harms of American policies on Iranian women are indisputable, here they serve to deflect attention away from the state’s subjugation of women.
The Tazmini article redirects attention away from the Iranian state’s repression and cultural impositions less directly through a broader ‘analytic strategy’ of ‘privileging … a critique against Western imperialism’.Footnote 100 This strategy begins with a section described as ‘situating the discussion’ providing an overview of Orientalism, Western saviourism, and its constructions of Iranian women ‘as victims of a backward society’Footnote 101 followed by a section titled ‘Bellydance and Orientalism’ which, while framed as an analysis of how dance can be inscribed with political meaning, devotes all but its introductory and concluding paragraphs to describing Western Orientalist representations, appropriations, and consumption of belly dancing. These sections combined with a subsequent section introducing Ale-e Ahamad’s powerful 1962 anti-imperialist critique in Westoxification serve to, as Terman argues, ‘prime’ the reader in an ‘anti-imperialist mindset’ and suture objections to state restrictions on dance to ‘illegitimate projects such as imperialism, Islamophobia and western superiority’.Footnote 102
Adhering to cultural and religious essentialism
Third, Reverse SVS politics often define populations in non-Western contexts through orientalist, essentialising, monolithic, and static notions of their culture or religions. As the late Paul Farmer noted, ‘awareness of cultural difference has long complicated discussions of human suffering’, with cultural difference constituting ‘one of several forms of essentialism used to explain away assaults on dignity and suffering’.Footnote 103 Both the denigration and adulation of culture are born from a drive to construct an Other in contrast to the West.Footnote 104 Viewing anti-imperialist-branding states as victims standing up to Western imperialism leads progressive saviourists to idealise and uncritically accept such states’ cultural relativism claims through appeals to tolerance for ‘diverse’ religious and cultural practices while labelling objections to these practices Islamophobia, neo-orientalism, or cultural imperialism. Thus, whereas traditional saviourism depoliticises political structures by vilifying culture and treating it as the only source of non-Western populations’ suffering, progressive saviourism depoliticises culture by absolving, valorising, and divorcing it from domestic structures of power and politics. Violence carried out in the name of culture or religion is treated as banal, less grave, and more worthy of tolerance than the violence of imperialist actors, detracting from consideration of ‘local institutions and cultural processes that are implicated’ in the production of ‘hierarchies and forms of subordination’.Footnote 105 Instead of imposing universalism as those following SVS metaphor scripts do, Reverse SVS enthusiasts impose cultural relativism.
A common view among adherents of Reverse SVS logics is that, because ‘the real target of Western violence is Islam’,Footnote 106 the Islamophobia fuelled by Western post-9/11 policies can be countered by defending the practices traditional Western saviours decry. In the Iranian case, this translates into Reverse SVS practitioners uncritically accepting the Islamic Republic’s constructions of religion and culture encompassing hundreds of government encroachments on Iranians’ lives as ‘authentic’ expressions of non-Western culture. The treatment of the hijab is a prime example of this depoliticised cultural essentialism. Many works decrying traditional saviourism highlight the alternative and empowering social and political meanings veiling can take on to counter its orientalist constructions as singularly oppressive. In practice, however, rather than according alternative meanings, constructions of veiling as a religiously authentic non-oppressive practice become the only acceptable anti-orientalist, anti-imperialist representation of the practice. This is why the Code Pink delegation, which witnesses veiling forced on both Iranian women and their own female members, makes no mention of the veil until they encounter an Iranian woman dramatically rejecting it. Similarly, in The Stream episode, Arbabi’s reference to women being subject to acid attacks for improper hijab is never even acknowledged because it is read more as an exaggerated vehicle for assigning ‘backward culture’ to Iran than as an actual act of violence rooted in patriarchy, imposed religious interpretations, and the power politics of Iran’s Islamist state.
Despite noting that the state’s response to the dancer ‘reveals a rigid culturalist and essentialist notion of the West’,Footnote 107 an essentialist and depoliticised treatment of culture also appear in the #dancingisnotacrime article, which identifies transcending ‘totalising discourses’ through a ‘more culturally sensitive analysis’ of the Hojabri case as its primary aim.Footnote 108 While the article mentions ‘the outpouring of support for Hojabri in social media’ and Iranians’ rejection of the state’s actions, it does so only briefly to highlight the ‘misreading of the regime’s motives’ encompassed and to argue for the convergence of state and societal stances on dancing.Footnote 109 Although convergence with some segments of Iranian society exists, the article ignores the divergence with the state among other segments of society, treating culture as largely depoliticised, monolithic, and uncontested in a case where a teenager’s arrest for dancing without a hijab prompted a campaign where participating Iranians replicated her defiance.
Obscuring moral clarity through exclusive adherence to moral complexity
Fourth, Reverse SVS politics exclusively embrace moral complexity through calls for tolerance of cultural or religious differences, nuance, and context in lieu of more unequivocal denunciation of anti-imperialist-branding states’ transgressions. Mutua decries the assumption of moral clarity in traditional saviouristic human rights discoursesFootnote 110 and post-colonial feminists endeavour to ‘challenge reductive Western analyses of Middle East women as unfree’ by providing more complex and ‘expanded understandings of freedom and agency’.Footnote 111 However, to reveal ‘the gendered complexities of the real lives of Middle Eastern women’ and as a response to traditional saviouristic portrayals of them as ‘passive, silent, and oppressed’, reverse saviourists emphasise the ways these women are ‘active, practical, powerful and resourceful’.Footnote 112 While the complexity highlighted can serve as an important corrective for the distortions of SVS portrayals, the totalising formulation of complexity itself distorts reality by omitting the elements of injustice and moral clarity that can exist within or alongside the complexities.
In the case of Iran, adherents of Reverse SVS politics’ desire to portray Iran as an example of emancipation from the West leads them ‘to go through considerable analytical contortions’Footnote 113 to ignore the Iranian Revolution and regime’s complexities, contradictions, and very real consequences for women, religious minorities, and the entire population.Footnote 114 To challenge orientalist depictions of Iranian women as exclusively oppressed, anti-imperialist voices paint a picture of complexity, frequently offering the same evidence provided by the Iranian state’s Islamist variety of state feminism – that Iranian women lead happy lives, can be professionals, government officials, or athletes, or that 60 per cent or more of university students are women.Footnote 115 This is seen in Code Pink painstakingly highlighting a restaurant managed by women, a 3-woman ensemble, 17 female MPs, a female entrepreneur, a female lab researcher, a female kickboxing gold medallist, several actresses, a young female architect who ‘designed this unique three-story bridge’, and the wife of a nuclear physicist killed by Israel who ‘is also a professor’.Footnote 116 Such chronicling of active women while omitting the subjugation produced by the states’ institutionalised gender-based discrimination and depicting Iranian women as having the ‘agency to find local resolutions … to realize her rights’ produces ‘a distorted picture of women’s lives … within the Islamic Republic’s politics’.Footnote 117 In relation to veiling, such voices rightly treat veiling as having complex meanings and being capable of reflecting agency but refuse to take unequivocal stances against the subjugation and denials of agency encompassed in mandatory veiling where moral clarity exists. Thus in promoting moral complexity and denying concurrent moral clarity, they undermine valid rights claims. This, in turn, produces fragmentation and contestation over Iranian state transgressions in lieu of more unified international moral stances.
The 2022 ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ protests: Preliminary reflections on where the Reverse SVS critique should and should not take us
In September 2022, a single image of 22-year-old Jina Mahsa Amini, lying in a coma with a web of tubes before dying from injuries clearly caused by violence inflicted while detained for a minor violation of Iran’s mandatory hijab law, vividly encapsulated the Iranian states’ decades of subjugation of its population. Amini’s death in state custody sparked a tide of mass protests in over 160 cities, small towns, and even villages across Iran. The protests produced stunning iconic images and videos of Iranian women defiantly leading the protests, raising their fists, burning veils, dancing without veils, and chanting ‘woman, life, freedom’ (WLF), with men echoing as they stood behind them.
Images of unarmed protestors defiantly facing security forces beating them or shooting at them made it difficult to uncritically accord the state anti-imperialist victimhood. There was no central imperialist actor or anti-imperialist filter through which to explain away or muddy the regime’s highly visible repression. As with the small-scale 2017 anti-hijab protests, the WLF protests displayed Iranian women’s struggles in a way that separated it ‘from the “imposed” (Western) political agendas’.Footnote 118 Videos of women defiantly burning veils or schoolgirls chasing regime officials rendered inescapable the conclusion that those protesting were not in harmony with the state or its regime of social control. They were clearly resisting not only the mandatory hijab and the state’s litany of other ‘religious’ impositions but also the repressive Islamist state itself. One early image of hundreds of Iranians forming a human chain while standing face to face against rows of security forces in elaborate riot gear powerfully captures the extraordinary rupture between population and state.Footnote 119
Further, WLF participants were not agentless victims; their agency was unmistakable. Iranian women on Iranian streets were themselves resisting the state’s injustices. They simultaneously transcended orientalist tropes of women as agentless victims of their culture and post-colonial constructions of them as in harmony with the discrimination and violence to which they have been subjected in the name of culture and anti-imperialist resistance for 43 years. Still, although their rejection of impositions of culture was unmistakable, Iranians’ treatment of culture and religion was highly politicised, not depoliticised as it is within SVS and Reverse SVS politics. They were not fighting Islam, but the oppressive political structures assembled in the name of Islam.
Protesting Iranians also sought international solidarity and the promise of the human rights framework. That the protestors could not simply be labelled as mere extensions of American imperialism, opened the international terrain as a site of legitimate contestation over Iranians’ domestic injusticesFootnote 120 and human rights as a legitimate, serious, and weighty paradigm to be deployed against the Iranian state’s transgressions. This role did not arise from human rights’ links to Western actors or values; rather, it stemmed from the way human rights aligned with Iranians’ deep-seated aspirations for freedom and dignity at that moment. The weight and gravity of not only the anti-imperialist branding state’s violence but also its cultural and religious impositions, suddenly in full view and intelligible, explained why Iranians invoked human rights.
Drawing hope from the protests inside Iran, the diaspora also mobilised in unprecedented ways. Notably, they successfully pushed for the creation of a special United Nations human rights fact-finding mission for Iran and Iran’s expulsion from the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. In a November 2022 Security Council Aria-Formula meeting introduced by and seated next to the United States Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, British-Iranian actress and activist Nazanin Boniadi called for building ‘global unity … against the Islamic Republic’s crimes [and] human rights abuses’ because the Iranian people wanted the world to ‘stop turning a blind eye to their suffering to fulfill our own political objectives’, emphasising that the regime was ‘considered illegitimate by its own people’.Footnote 121 For months, the diaspora pursued an array of top-down and bottom-up human rights initiatives in which they solicited international solidarity and highlighted Iranian state violence largely without their message being disrupted, diluted, or challenged, even as diaspora voices peppered their WLF mobilisations with the optics and, increasingly, the substance of imperialist politics. Even a range of Western-based leftist intellectuals and political figures, as well as post-colonial scholars, expressed unqualified solidarity with protesting Iranians.Footnote 122
However, as many Iranians felt guarded relief that the cloak placed on their suffering had been lifted, conservative diaspora forces zeroed in on Reverse SVS politics. Deploying a mix of hyperbolic Reverse SVS critique and conspiracy theories, they waged vicious cyber-campaigns charging diaspora progressives with normalising the regime and whitewashing its repression, often delivered with vulgarities and threats of sexual violence antithetical to WLF.Footnote 123 Because the Reverse SVS critique resonated so strongly with them, a significant segment of the broader (including non-conservative) diaspora population gravitated towards the discourses and politics of the conservative forces making it. Soon the diaspora WLF mobilisations became dominated by long-standing conservative agendas: calls for Western states to identify the Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist entity, increasing (mostly targeted) sanctions, and ceasing nuclear weapons negotiations with the regime. More and more diaspora voices began floating the idea of American or Israeli military intervention in Iran, employing depoliticised Islamophobic discourses, and mirroring Israeli government rhetoric, complete with Yasime Pahlavi, the former Shah’s daughter-in-law, writing ‘Women, Life, Freedom’ as the caption of a photo of female Israeli Defense Force soldiers she posted.Footnote 124 With the regime’s unrelenting repression largely shutting down contention inside the country and conservative diaspora politics largely co-opting WLF mobilisations abroad, the moral clarity around the regime’s subjugation of Iranians once again dissipated.
This brief analysis of the trajectory of the WLF mobilisations provides several initial lessons relating to Reverse SVS dynamics. First, the WLF mobilisations were able to largely transcend Reverse SVS politics early on by forcing many adhering to Reverse SVS politics to uphold the agency of Iranians by seeing the Iranian state as they experienced it rather than through an idealised international victim lens collapsing state and population. This speaks to the need for an emancipatory politics much less invested in identifying victims and more focused on actual subjugation rooted in local populations’ lived experiences and agency. Doing this, requires a greater capacity to simultaneously hold multiple perpetrators to account.
Second, just as the SVS critique can serve to justify, downplay, or obscure grave local injustices, the Reverse SVS critique can be deployed to justify, downplay, or obscure grave international injustices. Several Iranian diaspora activists with cumulatively over a million followers just on Twitter/X regularly combined impassioned denunciations of Reverse SVS politics with signature SVS discourses on Iran, Israel, and the backwardness of Islam.Footnote 125 Similarly, taking their cue from diaspora activists, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in an address to IraniansFootnote 126 and Marco Rubio in his confirmation as United States secretary of state picked up ‘the Iranians are not the Islamic Republic’ mantra, with Rubio stating, ‘I don’t know of any other nation … in which there is a bigger difference between the people and those who govern them’.Footnote 127 In these ways, various actors used the Reverse SVS critique as an avenue to revert back to or justify SVS politics (Figure 2).
SVS–Reverse SVS Cycle.
Figure 2 Long description
A cycle diagram with four labeled boxes connected by arrows. The boxes are labeled as follows: 'SVS Politics', 'SVS Critique', 'Reverse SVS Politics' and 'Reverse SVS Critique'. The arrows indicate a continuous cycle moving from 'SVS Politics' to 'SVS Critique', then to 'Reverse SVS Politics' and finally to 'Reverse SVS Critique', before returning to 'SVS Politics'.
Third, the unmistakable Indigenous roots and exercises of agency of the early WLF protests rendered it a rare ‘easy’ case to transcend Reverse SVS politics. More often, local articulations of suffering at the hands of anti-imperialist victim-branding states are highly entangled with imperialist and SVS politics. This was true of the examples of the Reverse SVS metaphor used above. It has been a fixture of diaspora anti-hijab activism and was a staple of Iranian diaspora politics before and after the WLF protests, where the lines between inviting Western solidarity and Western saviourism were regularly blurred. The challenge for a reformulated emancipatory politics is to find ways to disentangle and find the moral clarity in human rights stances taken against local states, even when entangled with signature imperialist politics. Importantly, injustices and their instrumentalisations should be distilled and treated separately. After all, right-wing actors’ co-opting of the WLF movement and instrumentalisation of human rights discourses to promote their agendas does not and should not erase the Iranian state’s grave transgressions that spurred the initial WLF protests.
Finally, just as the contradictions of SVS politics diminish the weight of human rights claims, the contradictions of Reverse SVS politics can diminish the weight of important anti-imperialist stances, limiting ‘its capacity to upend the status quo’.Footnote 128 Although it was not entirely organic in light of Iranian, Saudi, and Israeli state media influence campaigns, more centrist Iranian diaspora members gravitated towards right-wing groups, discourses, and agendas at least in part because progressive voices downplayed a central pillar of their experiences of the regime: its oppression and subjugation. This suggests that emancipatory politics can become alienating and morally incoherent when it refuses to address its own contradictions and becomes too far removed from the lived experiences of the people whose plight it seeks to advance.
Conclusion
This article argues that longstanding power-laden human rights politics illuminated by Makau Mutua’s ‘Savages, Victims, and Saviours’ metaphor of human rights has given rise to a reactionary politics captured in an inverted metaphor: the Reverse Savages, Victims, Saviours metaphor of human rights politics. Within this politics, Western imperialism along with the human rights framework, and those deploying human rights become the savage. Anti-imperialist-branding states and their constructions of Indigenous culture or religion are recast as victims, the state’s victimhood subsuming and being treated as synonymous with that of the population it rules. Finally, committed adherents of critical or anti-imperialist worldviews and anti-imperialist thought, along with the anti-imperialist victim-branding state and its constructions of Indigenous culture, all serve as saviours. This Reverse SVS politics is anti-emancipatory because it eclipses and undermines local struggles against repressive states asserting anti-imperialist identities.
While Iran provides an especially all-encompassing case study, the analytical insights of the Reverse SVS metaphor are general and can shed light on dynamics around the intersection of imperialism, anti-imperialism, and human rights politics in numerous contexts. The Reverse SVS metaphor helps explain how the 2001 American invasion of Afghanistan lends an inhibiting aura of imperialism to discussions of the very real subjugation of Afghan women ever since. It offers insight into how state anti-imperialist discourses foreclosed global leftist solidarity against the atrocities carried out by the Assad regime, Iran, and Russia, despite many Syrians experiencing the Iranian and Russian interventions as imperialist. It also clarifies how orientalist coverage of the 2012 sexual assault of Jyoti Singh in British media and the Indian state’s denunciations of it served to muddle the strong moral stance that protesting Indians took against gender-based violence in the tragedy’s wake. Finally, Reverse SVS dynamics are reflected in contests over the subjugation of Palestinians in which, despite global activism being squarely focused on challenging Israeli SVS deployments used to justify mass atrocities, a few Palestinian activists posit Reverse SVS critiques of Hamas, among them some simultaneously rejecting and some reverting back to SVS politics.
Ultimately, as with the SVS critique, the Reverse SVS critique makes a normative argument for introspection on the ‘deep contradictions’Footnote 129 of the human rights politics it captures. It calls for a reformulated emancipatory politics that takes a more multifaceted approach to both the sources of non-Western populations’ suffering and their deployments of the human rights framework – one that gives neither imperialism nor anti-imperialist branding states a pass. Finally, underlying this article’s critique is an argument for drawing from the analytical prisms of the SVS and Reverse SVS metaphors without becoming trapped within the confines of either, or rejecting one construction only to arrive at the other. Movement in these directions appears to be slowly taking shape, particularly as many who ascribe to Reverse SVS politics now find themselves increasingly turning to the thin protections provided by international human rights and humanitarian law, human rights activists, and United Nations human rights experts within dramatically transforming new political landscapes.
Video Abstract.
To view the online video abstract, please visit: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210525101071.
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